Beacon technology has recently been introduced for use in retailing. Using a smartphone intermediary for example, the owner of the smartphone, typically a customer, will receive an invitation, an offer, or other relevant information when the smartphone detects a retailer's beacon and is triggered to look up the beacon identifier on the cloud and receive associated content. In this way the merchant invisibly develops a special relationship with the customer that is activated whenever the customer is in a store where beacons are deployed, typically by a “didEnterRegion event” that occurs when the smartphone (or other wireless device) is in radio proximity to a beacon. Different interactions may occur depending on how close the customer is to the beacon. Standard beacons have an approximate range of 70 meters. More recently the technology has been modified to include a wireless payment service that operates in close proximity to the beacon.
In use, the beacon transmission is recognized by compatible receivers (typically a smartphone) such that the bit string values may be used to look up pre-selected information through an internet connection mediated by the smartphone or other mobile device. The information may include “push notifications” that contain advertising information a retailer wants to share with the owner of the mobile device. Beacons do not themselves push notifications to receiving devices. However, software in the mobile device may trigger the push notifications according to permissions established by the owner. The smartphone owner has the option of ignoring these notifications, locking the display, or engaging so as to take advantage of a special offer, for example. The various aspects of mobile device functionality are enabled or restricted by device “policies”.
Beacons are configured to transmit a formatted string of frames or “values” at a fixed frequency and repeat rate. The transmission is read digitally at about 2.4 GHz and typically follows the Bluetooth low energy communications protocol. However, pairing is not required for the string to be received by a Bluetooth enabled device, which is generally transmitted without security features. A prefix in the transmission indicates the initiation of a bit string according to a recognized communications protocol; what follows is a unique universally identifier (UUID) that indicates the owner, supplier, logical group, or beacon type, followed by a major value and a minor value having information descriptive a particular beacon or class of beacons. Using a beacon configuration tool, the merchant will typically modify the major and minor values in the bit string to register or associate the beacon with a particular venue and a particular subspace in the venue. The major value may be used to indicate a specific store, for example of a franchise, and the Minor value may be used to identify a specific location within that particular store. Thus the string is conventionally used to identify the beacon, the beacon owner, and the beacon location. Aspects of conventional beacon technology are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,676,182, 8,880,770, and 8,998,096 and in Australian Pat. Publ. Doc. AU 2012/101222, all of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Major and minor values may be shared in programs so as to group certain classes of beacons, enabling the developer to configure the whole class in a single programming step. During a beacon deployment, the major and minor values are established to meet the needs of the installer or operator, and thus are not dynamic and subject to change unless re-configured by operator intervention.
Similarly, the UUID is static and is registered to the device unless re-programmed. UUID naming is widely used in programming to identify a device owner, and the 128-bit structure was adopted as a standard to ensure a high level of uniqueness no matter how the UUID was generated. Methods for generating a UUID include for example concatenating the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since zero time on the Gregorian calendar with the MAC address of the computer that generates the UUID. Alternatively, UUIDs may be hashed from the developer's POSIX UID or GID and domain, or may be spliced together from a random number generator and a version number. Other proprietary hash functions may be used to derive a UUID from a domain name, object identifier or distinguishing name, and so forth. The entire purpose of this effort is to prevent inadvertent errors and hash collisions where a program ambiguously refers to two different devices having the same UUID, destabilizing the stack. The more the UUID is randomly selected, the less likely an error or collision will be.
Thus the beacon communication protocol has not evolved to share information directly, it has evolved to ensure that developers and owners may reliably apply attributes to particular devices or classes of devices without ambiguity, and that customers will be directed according to policies implemented in a compatible application to an internet website having information that relates to a unique beacon identified as being in proximity to the customer's mobile device and to no other (as a security means).
However, conventional uses are now being supplanted. Beacons may find household, business, and environmental uses not related to retail sales, such as tracking, finding, and monitoring, where the beacon is sensed by a device programmed to report or track its location. Art of this kind is described in U.S. patent Ser. No. 14/301,236 to Dauora, filed 10 Jun. 2014, which is co-owned and co-pending and which is incorporated herein in full by reference for all it teaches.
Once a beacon has been identified and located, it may be of practical value to ask the beacon to report on its environment or “context”. But because beacons are supported by a highly resource limited computing platform, queries that involve bidirectional pairing may be impractical or limited by signal transmission crowding. Thus there is a need for a beacon that is equipped to report contextual content without introducing additional frames or values into the basic communications protocol. A solution to these and other interrelated problems represents an unmet need in the art and is an object of this invention.